Forensic Mysteries

On the way to hurricane-ravaged Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, Tempe receives a call from the Charleston coroner. The storm has tossed ashore a medical waste container. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic and bound with electrical wire. Tempe recognizes many of the details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec 15 years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she travels to Montreal to gather evidence. Meanwhile, health authorities in South Carolina become alarmed as a human flesh-eating contagion spreads.

DEEP BENEATH THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, a murder victim is dumped at an archaeological dig. A note pinned to his shirt warns we will bury you. The question is, who is you? Desperate to learn what happened—and what might happen next—investigators bring in forensic geologists Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws. They have a reputation for reading the rocks with an X-ray eye, and unlocking a case.

There are 206 bones in the human body. Forensic anthropologists know them intimately, can read in them stories of brief or long lives and use them to reconstruct every kind of violent end. 206 Bones opens with Tempe regaining consciousness and discovering that she is in some kind of very small, very dark, very cold enclosed space. She is bound, hands to feet. Who wants Tempe dead, or at least out of the way, and why? Tempe begins slowly to reconstruct...

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire: Healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her - and learns of some troubling parallels to her own life.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are 36 bodies all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun. Again.

In Trace, Scarpetta travels to Richmond, Virginia, at the odd behest of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a perplexing crime. When she arrives, however, Scarpetta finds that nothing is as she expected: her former lab is in the final stages of demolition; the inept chief isn't the one who requested her after all; her old assistant chief has developed personal problems that he won't reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent, whom Marino dislikes instantly, meddles with the case.

Eve Duncan returns in a thriller that pits her against the most evil mind she has ever encountered: a ruthless killer who taunts her with his every move...and who has a special affinity for blood. When a Georgia senator's daughter is found murdered, and her body drained of blood, Eve Duncan is drawn into the web of Kevin Jelak - a serial murderer who is on Eve's short list of killers who might know something about her missing daughter Bonnie.

The dead can't speak to us, Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. The body Patrick Fort is examining in anatomy class is trying to tell him all kinds of things. But no one hears what he does, and no one understands when he tries to tell them. Life is already strange enough for Patrick - being a medical student with Asperger's Syndrome doesn't come without its challenges. And that's before he is faced with solving a possible murder, especially when no one believes a crime has even taken place.

Someone is stalking the UCLA Medical Center - a depraved madman who is preying upon the staff, particularly those who are young and female. No stranger to the terrible ravages of senseless violence, E.R. Chief Dr. David Spier must keep the emergency room running smoothly and efficiently, even as his terrified co-workers wonder who will be the next victim. But when the monster himself is dragged into the E.R. in handcuffs - hideously burned, suffering, and begging for mercy - the nightmare is far from over. It has only just begun.

AJ Docker (Doc) and his guard dog, Banshee, move to a small town in the mountains for a slower-paced lifestyle. Doc settles into the idyllic setting with a rewarding job and enriching colleagues, as well as with a romantic interest who leads him to contemplate marriage. His new life seems perfect, until he begins to uncover the town's dirty secrets. A serial killer hunts in the woods, and dirty money flows throughout the town.

Medical examiner Laura Hanning has two charred corpses and no answers. Both bear mysterious tattoos but exhibit no known cause of death. Their only connection to one another is a string of puzzling miracle cures. Her preliminary investigation points to a cult in the possession of the fabled panacea - the substance that can cure all ills - but that's impossible.

The volcano beneath her town is seething, and the town's fate now rests in the hands of an emergency planner with a twisted agenda. The mayor's death is personal for investigators Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws. This is their hometown. They are desperate to save their families and friends. Their field is forensic geology, and they know how to track mineral clues to find out where the mayor went and what she found.

The Book of the Dead is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to acquire a new meaning. A sixteen-year-old tennis star, fresh from a tournament win Charleston, is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. The body of an abused young boy is dumped in a desolate marsh. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home.

If the biblical plagues of Egypt truly happened—could they happen again—on a global scale? Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, Professor Harold McCabe comes stumbling out of the sands, but he dies before he can tell his story. Then an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone had begun to mummify the professor's body—while he was still alive. Subsequently, the medical team who had performed the man's autopsy has fallen ill with an unknown disease. Fearing the worst, a colleague of the professor reaches out to Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force. The call is urgent, for Professor McCabe had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses.

Colleagues-turned-spouses Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton already have their plates full with demanding forensic pathology work and family pressures. The last thing they need is the sudden death of a colleague. Yet when Laurie’s apparently vital and healthy longtime friend Dr. Sue Passero dies mysteriously in the hospital parking garage, an autopsy is required, and it falls uncomfortably under Laurie’s purview as the chief medical examiner. So when Laurie asks Jack to take special care with the case, he can hardly refuse.

Dr. Katheryn Newton has dedicated her brilliant mind to groundbreaking medical research. She’s attempting to save lives and hoping to start a family when a catastrophic twist turns her world upside down. Suddenly, Kate finds herself with the power to invisibly end any life. Within hours, Kate is caught in a moral conundrum and trapped in a web of deception. She fights on, fiercely determined to help her country and the planet, but it’s tough when doing good means being bad—and dangerous when someone knows your secret.

On a cold, rainy morning, finance journalist Ally Linden arrives soaked to the bone at her Manhattan office, only to find that she's forgotten her keycard. When her boss shows, he's shocked to see her - because, he explains, she hasn't worked there in five years. Ally knows her name, but is having trouble coming up with much beyond that, though after a trip to the psychiatric ER, she begins to piece together important facts: She lives on the Upper West Side; she's now a freelance journalist; she's married to a terrific man named Hugh.

Master Sergeant Reed Beckham has led his Delta Force Team, codenamed Ghost, through every kind of hell imaginable and never lost a man. When a top-secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet - a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters.

It is a case unlike any psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware has ever encountered. Five-year-old Woody Swope is ill, but the real problem is his parents. They refuse to agree to the one treatment that could save this boy's life. Alex sets out to convince Mr. and Mrs. Swope - only to find that the parents have left the hospital and taken their son with them. Worse, the sleazy motel room where the Swopes were staying is empty - except for the ominous bloodstain. The Swopes and their son have vanished into the sordid shadows of the city.

Eleven years ago, the Co-ed Slayer murdered nine female students on the Oregon State University campus. Lacey Campbell barely escaped his attack, but lost her best friend whose remains were never found. As the sole surviving victim, Lacey helped send the sadistic serial killer to prison for life. Now a forensic odontologist examining teeth and bones for the state Medical Examiner, Lacey is devastated when she arrives at a crime scene and identifies the skeletal remains as her college friend’s.